I want...

[cellio]

...a tool that will let me banish Outlook from my desktop once and for all.

I'm using Outlook at work through historical happenstance, even though I know it's hell-spawn and I've never actually liked it. I would like to switch to pine, a mailer that I know, like, and trust not to inflict virii and gratuitous HTML and similar crap upon me. The problem is that I have 10 months' worth of saved mail, in folders, that is important. I want to be able to move that mail to pine format. This means converting from whatever internal format Microsoft is using to plain text (no HTML markup), ideally in nicely-formatted lines under 80 characters, and pine-ifying it (inserting the characters that separate messages). Quoted text still needs to look like quoted text, even if the message used indentation rather than explicit demarcation. I want to preserve the existing sets of folders automagically; I'm willing to export one folder at a time and copy the resulting file to the right place in the pine directory structure, but I'm not willing to dump everything in one huge file and sort it out again.

I'm also not really willing to forward all my saved mail to myself, partly because of the one-huge-pile problem and partly because I want From lines to be meaningful. (The latter could possibly be fixed by a different script that would rewrite the resulting files.) Mostly, though, because it would be a tedious manual process.

I fear, though, that I'm going to be stuck with Outlook forever.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Pine (whether for Win32 or Un*x) uses standard unix mail spool format, which means that it assumes that a line beginning with "From" means the start of a new message.

Pegasus Mail, the 'doze mail tool I've used for years, does too.

Of course, M$ makes it easy to convert to using a M$ product, but very difficult to convert away from it again.

There are conversion utilities for the LookOut! .PST file format to plain text. Check out the following URLs, found via Google:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/mini/Outlook-to-Unix-Mailbox (http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/mini/Outlook-to-Unix-Mailbox)

This applies to LookOut!, not LookOut! ExPest, and requires installing Linux, which many of us don't exactly think is a bad thing.

In fact, why not ditch proprietary software entirely and go open source? You won't have all these problems.

[cellio]

Thanks for the pointer!

Pine (whether for Win32 or Un*x) uses standard unix mail spool format, which means that it assumes that a line beginning with "From" means the start of a new message.

That's reassuring. I was looking at existing Pine folders (which were built by Pine, not imported), and they seem to have some special stuff at the beginning of the file and then, for each message, several lines of headers before you ever get to the From: line. But presumably its reading is more flexible.

In fact, why not ditch proprietary software entirely and go open source? You won't have all these problems.

It's the work machine; Windows is a requirement of the job. :-(

My home machine is currently Windows, though we've got a spare machine now that we're trying to configure as a Linux box. If that works out, we can then switch the other machines. I have a Unix shell account for personal mail, though (and news, and web space, and all that good stuff). I can run pc-pine on the Windows box at work, once I salvage the existing mail. Or, as another person suggested, even before. Maybe that's a project for tomorrow.

It's not a bug, it's a feature

[prejlog.livejournal.com]

You said:
I fear, though, that I'm going to be stuck with Outlook forever.

But that's not a bug, it's a *feature* of Outlook, at least from their perspective. Why should Micro$oft make it easy for teh users to leave? (Outlook: the roach motel of ifnormation).

Wht I'd do is switch to pine now, before it's too late. You'll still have the outlook stuff around, and if you need to respond to a message you can copy and paste on a case to case basis. Hoepfully there willb e a solution for translating the outlook file eventually, but at least you'll be free, free!

Re: It's not a bug, it's a feature

[cellio]

Good point -- two separate piles of mail might not be the worst thing in the world. Thanks!

Re: It's not a bug, it's a feature

[prejlog.livejournal.com]

You're wlcome. And to respond to the Eudora vs Pien question: I've used both, and liek both. I'm using Eudora now 'cause i want to work off line (only one phone line for internet & voice), but pine is cool too. Eudora's very easy to use, and I seem to remember it was pretyt easy to transition from pine to eudora. Right now I'm using 5.1 on the Mac in free mode, and it's keeping me happy (had been using lite for a while but teh horrible search function was driving me mad. I had to open my Email folders in BBEdit lite and use its grep function whenever I wanted to do a search!) When I get the time/money i'll pay to make the ads go away, but they aren't really obnoxious. (had a friend with netzero... now THAT was obnoxious ads!)

[asim.livejournal.com]

Well, I was using Eudora at home when I ran Windows, and I'd highly recommend it, esp. as it stores mail in mbox format.
Along those lines, you might want to try Outlook2Unix (http://www.active-com.de/out2unix/), and then change over to Eudora? I've never used the product, but it's likely worth a shot. I recall someone making a Outlook2Evolution product as well (which'll be standard mbox as well), I can look it up if you like.

[cellio]

Thanks for the pointer. I'll check it out.

I'm looking at Pine because I'm already familiar with it (I use it for my personal email); I've never used Eudora so I'd have to learn it. Which might not be a big deal, but I have a client that I know works, and it's a text format so I'll never have to deal with the proprietary BS again after this. (Not saying that Eudora uses a proprietary format; I have no clue what it uses.)

LookOut -> pine

[figmo.livejournal.com]

While trying to help a co-worker move her stuff from Netscape Mail to LookOut on a Wintel box I came across the following tricks for doing the reverse:

1. Use Netscape's mail reader to convert the files from LookOut format to standard mail format.
2. Move the folders to a place where you can use pine to read e-mail
3. Use pine to access your converted folders.

Voila! No digging for funny tools, no problem!